Scott Kellogg, founder of Austin’s Rhizome Collective, just released a cutting-edge book on urban sustainability. Rust, short for Radical Urban Sustainability Toolbox, is a how-to guide for reducing your footprint and improving your quality of life without having to move into the boondocks. He’s agreed to spend some time speaking with me, and I’d like […]
If you need an excuse to switch to biking as your primary means of transportation, check out this video from Austin’s Yellow Bike Project, as they move 4500 square feet of bike parts from one shop to another. Particularly amazing starting at 3:30: Doesn’t your commute seem a bit mild in comparison?
The RoofRay site allows you to specify location, size and slope of your roof via Google Maps. It then uses this info to estimate how much energy can be generated from your available exposure. Though perhaps not terribly precise, it’s certainly helpful for familiarizing more people with some determining factors and maybe even making solar […]
From the Core77 blog: The AEOLUS race, to be held in the Netherlands later this month, pits competing single-person land yachts against each other, with the requirement that they sail directly into the wind. The vehicles are therefore quite different from the sail-powered craft of old, using wind turbines to harvest energy and translate it […]
Here’s what you need to know to make a quick, very serviceable compost bin out of four wooden shipping pallets. Pallet Compost Bin
Design~Build~Live is one of a healthy number of groups in Austin doing their part to fill us all in on the ‘no-brainers’ of sustainability: measures where you don’t make a sacrifice to green your life but rather end up with a ‘better than polluting’ outcome. To steal a Worldchanging catchphrase, they’re trying to create a […]
The above graphic is from a book that does not stink: The Humanure Handbook. Here’s a pdf version of this potential soution to water overuse. As author Joseph Jenkins notes, “a single person using a Clivus (pronounced Clee-vus) Multrum [specific type of composting toilet] will produce 40 kg (88 lbs) of compost per year while […]
